Ada Louise Huxtable

Ada Louise Huxtable(Ada Louise Landman),
(born March 14, 1921, New York, N.Y.—died Jan. 7, 2013, New York City), American architecture critic who praised the construction and preservation of Manhattan buildings that complied with her vision of respecting societal needs and maintaining civic history but unleashed a torrent of biting commentary aimed at architects and developers who erected structures and built communities of questionable architectural integrity for moneyed clients. She served as the first full-time architecture critic (1963–82) for the New York Times and later wrote (1997–2012) for The Wall Street Journal. After graduating (1941) from Hunter College, New York City, and studying at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, she was employed by the retailer Bloomingdale’s to sell a line of furniture by Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames. During that time she met her husband, L. Garth Huxtable, an industrial designer, who later provided the photographs for her books. In the 1950s Huxtable began to write for architectural journals, and her pieces for The New York Times Magazine caught the attention of Clifton Daniel, the assistant managing editor of the Times, who created the post of critic specifically for her. In her column she stressed the importance of “the retention and active relationship of the buildings of the past to the community’s functioning present.” She was unable to prevent the demolition in 1963 of New York’s grandiose Penn Station, however, and thereafter she became a prime instigator for the creation in 1965 of the Landmarks Preservation Commission for New York City. In her withering essay collection Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? (1970), she lambasted the office and sports complex (Madison Square Garden) that replaced Penn Station. In 1970 arts criticism was added as a Pulitzer Prize category, and Huxtable won the inaugural award. Other books that related her point of view include Kicked a Building Lately? (1976), Goodbye History, Hello Hamburger (1986), and The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (1997). She left the New York Times after she was named (1981) a MacArthur fellow. Huxtable’s last book, On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change, was published in 2008.

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